These last few days I have been reading a book written by Ed Catmull, one of the founders of Pixar called Creativity Inc. This book details the journey of Pixar and gives some great insight into the practices and methodology they employ. One of these inner methodologies coined by Andrew Stanton, a Pixar director, is “Fail early and often”. Ed Catmull does a wonderful job of explaining how this practice is used inside Pixar, so I won’t rehash any of that.

I have always seen failure as a thing to be avoided and have spent great effort to plan and manage failure out of anything I do. I tend to only allow for things that will allow for success and regard unsuccessful endeavors as being something without value.

It is important to remember that failure is one aspect of the learning process. A fear of failure cripples our learning process and by extension the ability to succeed. It is important to make a decision, an informed decision, as early as possible so that if it doesn’t work a new direction can be taken.

So go out there and try things, fail a little along the way but most importantly succeed.